“This is the problem in Iraq,” said Zuhair al-Chalabi , Iraq’s national reconciliation adviser, who spends his days trying to mediate blood disputes between warring militias and tribes. “Iraqis have to forget their wounds. Time. We need time.”Trying to mediate blood disputes is how medieval kings spent much of their time, although the disputes were usually between noble families rather than militias or tribes. Of course I have no idea what the Arabic is (David?), but Iraqis who want revenge are made to speak about "satisfaction," the old language of honor and feud in Europe.But not everyone is patient, or ready to forgive. “The law and the courts do not help us,” said Jasim al-Ajili, a Shiite Muslim in the northeastern city of Baquba, who lost two nephews to Qaeda assassinations. He said he had identified the family responsible for the murders and is planning his revenge.
“I will arrest him, kidnap him, record his confessions,” he said. “Then I will kill him if the judiciary does nothing.”
I would say that the shift from depending on the family for safety to depending on the state is one of the most basic steps toward modern nationhood, so it seems to me that Iraq still has a long distance to travel.
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It's been years since I did much with Arabic, but the basic word is tha'r, which is simply translated in my dictionary as "revenge." But the interpreter could be translating another word, such as a more specialized legal one, or one in Iraqi dialect, or one popularized in modern Arab media.
The usage in the article is "They (meaning the aggrieved, the ones who want vengeance) just want to be satisfied." It's possible the interpreter is reaching for something like our modern usage, "They just want closure" (regardless of whether moralizing Americans would be inclined to see vengeance as a proper form of closure). Alternatively, the interpreter may be influenced by British legal language, where satisfaction has the meaning of collecting a debt (the etymological root of "vengeance," in the Latin vindico, has a similar legalistic meaning, that is to lay a claim on something).
I don't know where all this goes or what it tells us about contemporary Iraq, but I think it's fun.
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